


The Blessings of Chaos

by capuaisburning



Category: Warhammer Fantasy
Genre: Beastmen - Freeform, Chaos, Gen, the empire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 03:28:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2009193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capuaisburning/pseuds/capuaisburning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A strange little boy in a backwater village in the Empire finds his journey to manhood involves more and darker changes than most.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Blessings of Chaos

**Author's Note:**

> Contains some bloody violence, potentially icky descriptions of disease, and mild (I think) references to freaky mutant sex.

One night when Hans Keffler was five years old, he started awake in the loft of his father’s barn, in the nook of stale straw where he was accustomed to sleeping. Griping pain guttered in the pit of his stomach, and he felt hot gobbets of sweat running down his face. Outside, a coursing wind wound through the close-set streets of the village, and made the dark eaves of the Drakwald shudder and ripple in the gloom. Morrslieb was ripe and full, and as he tottered out of the barn into its ugly light, peeling back his threadbare shirt to paw helplessly at his chest, the glow of the Chaos Moon picked out the mottled pattern spreading across his bare skin.

He had always been an unfavoured child. His membership of the family Keffler was based more on grudging blood-loyalty than on genuine love and affection. An extra mouth ushered unexpectedly into a hard world when it was thought that his mother was past child-bearing age, he slept, ate and bathed apart from his four older brothers and sisters. This made it fairly easy to conceal the strange blotches that now marked his chest and gut from the hostile eyes of others. They were an unsightly mix of brittle orange hairs (with an unsettling tendency to shiver and bristle when there was no breeze) and bruise-purple splotches that shifting into eye-watering shapes at regular intervals, swirling like wet ink. 

At first, the sight of his altered body filled little Hans Keffler with nauseous distress and a nameless, biting shame. Yet the passage of years would bring familiarity, acceptance, even an odd sense of comfort. He would sit amidst the straw after the day’s chores were done and stare at the markings with wondering little boy’s eyes, imagining that he could divine some great truth from their endless, hypnotic dance over his flesh.

When Hans Keffler was twelve, a gaggle of the village boys decided to while away a dull afternoon by dunking him in the muddy leavings of a summer storm. Never blessed with strength or speed, and with his siblings carelessly indifferent to his plight, he was a regular target for the everyday thuggery practiced by the sort of bored youth who can be found loitering in the streets of backwater villages the length and breadth of the Empire. There had been six of them this time, chortling as he floundered in the mud-pit, sending him flailing back into the mire with stinging cuffs every time he tried to clamber out. It was not the first dose of petty misery they’d doled out to him over the years, but that day the humiliation had woken something that seethed furiously inside him, frustrated anger and shame filling up his mind with a hot, sharp clarity.

When one fat, pock-marked boy leant forward, smirking, and casually spat on his face, the boiling storm within was finally unleashed, seizing control of his head and limbs. The midday sunlight seemed to become swamped in churning clouds of blood and shadow (one of the other boys spent the remainder of his short life convinced that Hans’ eyes had flashed a livid crimson in that moment). With strength that should have been beyond his young frame, he had leapt clear of the clinging mud, splashing filth over the startled faces of his torturers. One particularly dim-witted brute swung a fist into his grimy cheek, slewing his head around and tearing blood from his skin. Hans reacted by screaming an oath in a language that no-one in the village had ever heard before and clawing up handfuls of the oaf’s jerkin, hauling him off his feet and flinging him to the ground with enough force to snap his arm beneath his own falling bulk. The podgy disfigured boy darted at him, but Hans’ fist took him squarely under the chin and hurled him into the side of the nearest house with a ringing crash that shook splinters from the shutters. As the other boys shied back, he wheeled and fell upon his first target, powering his fists into that squirming figure until blood from both of them mingled on his knuckles.

Someone cracked a stick across the back of his head and sense melted down into a red blur of pain and hate. When he came to himself, his whole body was quivering like a sapling in a gale, his knuckles were all but stripped of skin, and the whole gang were laid out whimpering and twitching about him.

That night, as he sat in the barn loft and tended his wounds, he saw that the backs of his forearms had sprouted glossy red fur, like the pelt of some exotic beast-breed.

When Hans Keffler was seventeen, he became briefly and fiercely infatuated with Mika, one of the village girls. The village boys had long since learned to avoid him, cringing nervously in his presence, yet unfortunately the girls had never learned to do the opposite. As Hans bent to his chores in the fields, he peered at Mika, studying her. She seemed to shimmer with a youthful joy such as he had never known, her cheeks blushing with a rosy sweetness as she laughed with the friends and chaperones that surrounded her. It was as though she was a princess at some court affair in Altdorf, and not a peasant girl washing homespun garments in a stream that gurgled along the shadowed verge of the Drakwald. 

Hans stewed with newborn lust. The sunlight seemed to form a hazy crown above Mika’s smiling face, while her streaming black hair became a glossy mantle that melted into the darkness of the forest behind her.

The next day, he approached her as she slipped back down to the stream, amid the gathering shades of evening, to meet another of the village boys. When the dull-eyed lad saw Hans glaring at him out of the dark, he squirmed, averted his eyes from Mika, and slunk away, muttering excuses to himself.

Mika lingered, staring with curiosity at the unkempt but not unappealing boy of who so much was whispered in the village. She approached him gingerly, feeling a strange thrill of mingled fear and excitement as she saw the odd lustre in his eyes. She let slip a shrill giggle as he pawed clumsily at her hand.

Hans Keffler did not know how to court. His innocent directness was refreshing after the sly and knowing approaches of the other youths, but Mika’s interest quickly faded as the despairing hunger behind his level stare started to feel more unsettling than exciting. She wriggled out of his grip and turned back towards the lights of the village, shaking her head as if to clear her strange thoughts away like so many cobwebs.

With a guttural cry of desire, Hans wrenched her back around, straining the fabric of her sleeve. His eyes were blazing, pinkish-red sparks in a face that was warped into a leering grimace. Foul and misshapen things reared over his shoulders, discoloured flesh glistening as they snickered through mouths of needle-teeth.

Mika’s young beauty became a stricken mask of white dread. Wild with terror, she tore away from this boy who was not a boy, her sudden screams snatched by the rising gale. Out of her mind with fearful loathing, she fled thoughtlessly into the deeper dark of the Drakwald itself, where yet grimmer suitors waited to claim her.

That night, a storm of rare power lashed the village and made folk cringe and shiver in their beds. Shutters were ripped loose and freezing water scourged into homes, bringing chills and fever with it. Several trees were brought down. One thick trunk fell onto the house of the dim youth who had been Mika’s original assignation, crushing him and his younger brother into a grisly paste where they lay, while mad voices hooted mockery on the wind. 

Framed in the splayed shutters of the barn loft, Hans howled his frustration into the thunder, a raving fiend lit by the cruel green light of Morrslieb. He could feel fresh growths spiking eagerly out of his skin, his shirt quivering as obscene life boiled beneath it, and screamed all the louder.

Mika was never seen again.

When Hans Keffler was twenty, plague came to the village, borne on a rank wind from out of the deep woods. The local initiate of Morr was among the first to weaken and wither, retching soundlessly as blossoming boils tracked pus across his cheeks. Without the holy man’s guidance, the business of tending the village’s many dead and dying quickly broke down. Men and women simply lay groaning in the streets, their bodies oozing pestilence. One wretch, stumbling through the village in the throes of his fevered anguish, fell into the stream and poisoned it forever, turning its waters rank with frothy green scum.

The other members of the Keffler family had all perished by the end of the third week of death. A neighbour found them slumped over the meal-table, staining the wood with the filth that trickled out of their ruptured faces. Hans Keffler’s father lolled in his chair, his eyes bright with pain and horror, slack mouth dripping some nameless foulness. His dead gaze was fixed upon his youngest son, who stood in the corner of the room, swaying on unsteady feet, his face clearly stamped with the marks of plague. Yet he was alive, eyes glittering. He had sweated through his clothes and was naked from the waist up, revealing to the eyes of the surviving villagers the multiplying alterations that had taken root in his muscled body.

They came at him then, at long last, freed from restraint by his family’s passing and the confirmation of every vague suspicion, every gnawing fear. The tines of a pitchfork left twin bloody punctures in his side. The swipes of a club split his scalp and peppered the floor with a quarter of his teeth. A wild lunge with a carving knife pierced his arm and tore a gargling screech from his dripping lips.

Yet he still had the strength to fling them aside and tear out of the home that had never been his. The village tanner threw himself onto Hans’s back, trying to drag him down. Hans threw him off with a slobbering snarl and stamped down hard, leaving the tanner yowling in the dirt, curled around his broken bones. Trailing blood and more unsightly fluids from his various rips and gouges, Hans tottered away through the trees, chased by vengeful screams and yells until he lost himself amidst the Drakwald’s twisted depths.

He spent the first two days of exile alone, blundering about in the near dark. Roots snarled his feet and branches whipped his face. He found the half-chewed carcass of a deer and tore strips of meat out of the glistening mess with his waxing beast-strength, gagging it down. He sucked moisture off clammy leaves, and lapped at murky forest pools. He lived, though the Chaos-plague still bubbled in his innards and his injuries made him dizzy with pain. His changed flesh somehow healed itself, the wounds sprouting into fresh growth, or simply hardening into a brittle reddish-black crust.

When he woke in the early hours of the third day, shaking and gasping amidst the crooked roots of a dead tree where he had lain down in dazed exhaustion the previous night, he realized that something was different. Though it was still half-dark, and his eyes felt strangely sore, he could see much farther than previously, his gaze effortlessly plumbing the brooding Drakwald shadows. He looked down at his body, and saw that the marks of mutation had spread to cover all of him. His toes had fused into hoof-like stubs, his limbs were shaggy with fur, and he could feel odd, bony contours on his plague-scarred face. The pestilence that had doomed the village seemed to have been seared from his veins.  
He felt alert, alive, gripped by a yearning that sent him loping ever deeper into the woods at a galloping pace. Green light slithered through the canopy and lit the trail, and the undergrowth trembled with an eager susurration. 

As he drew nearer to the forest’s heart, he began to hear a hungry, heathen drumming somewhere ahead of him. 

Above Hans Keffler’s malformed head, Morrslieb swelled from behind the tatters of cloud that formed a black halo for its leering light. Fire-glow flickered ahead of him, and the drums boomed louder, quivering the leaves. He pushed himself onward, his belly fiery with sudden hunger. Dark scales bulged out of his upper back and rippled down his spine. He could feel his skin shift and thicken.

Hans Keffler’s twentieth year of life gave way to the twenty-first a few heartbeats before he burst into the fire-lit clearing where clawed hands pounded at the drums. His wondering eyes took in the wild and demented scene.

A hundred gruesome figures bellowed and keened in the trampled clearing. Burly creatures with the bodies of circus strongmen and the heads of goats pranced around the fire-pit, hollering hoarse praises to the Chaos Moon. Altered shapes of every description crowded together, feasting, chanting, coupling and worshipping before the four crudely-carved idols that loomed above the flames. Here, a woman with the features of a great bird, complete with a serrated beak smeared with grease and blood, mated frantically with a squat man whose forearms were twin nests of twining fronds and whose head sported misshapen antlers. Above them, one of the idols, an androgynous shape splashed with garish paint, seemed to leer down appreciatively. There, a wiry man with snapping mandibles was locked in a knife-fight with a hunch-backed beast-thing before another idol, whose carved mane was dark with dried blood and whose haunches were half-buried in piled bones.

Hans Keffler’s fading humanity told him he should be terrified and sickened by this lunatic spectacle, but the thought had little weight behind it. His blood ran hot, and his brain boiled over with mad joy, smothering doubt and fear and pain. A comforting heat spread through his limbs. For the first time in his sorry life, he felt that he was in the place where he was supposed to be.

One of the goat-faced creatures emerged from the throng, wrapped in tatty skins, fetishes swinging around its neck. Heads turned as it loped towards him, spitting and growling. He read its intent in its bestial face long before it hefted a bone-handled mace and aimed a whirring blow at his head.

Time turned to ooze. The mace crept through its arc, so slowly that he could almost see the air buckle and part around it. The mutated throng were frozen, a forest of ghastly effigies. He looked past them, past the hate-filled eyes of his assailant, towards the four idols. They seemed to smile at him, willing him on. He smiled back.

The mace hissed through empty space and thumped the earth. The beastman stumbled, unbalanced. Hans moved with liquid, predatory speed, dodging around behind it and taking its horned head in a pitiless grip. His arms clamped into place like a vice, cutting off its bark of denial. He breathed in the stench of its greasy fur as he broke its neck with a single convulsive twist. 

Hans stood over the body of his victim, panting with sudden weariness, as the crowd studied him inscrutably. All he could hear were the crackle of the fire-pit, the moan of the wind and his own harsh breaths. 

Abruptly, a second beastman pushed free of his fellows and hobbled up to Hans. The creature held a crook of blackened wood in one hand, and wove the other through the air in an intricate series of gestures that seemed to leave faint, swirling traces of darkness where they passed. 

The beastman’s eyes were shadowy hollows, giving no clue to whatever thoughts lay behind them. Hans studied it warily, marshalling his strength for another kill. The beastman bared its fangs at him in a rictus smile.

“Welcome home,” it croaked, “brother.”

Over the eventful months that followed, Hans Keffler carved intricate designs into his altered body, honouring the gods as he had honoured them his whole life without knowing it. He found further rivals within the tribe, strutting braves eager to rend and maul their way to dominance, and he splashed their blood over the idol of Khorne. He coupled with beastwomen by the dozen, glutting himself on their acrid stink. With each rising of Morrslieb, his strength swelled and the Chaos Moon whispered more secrets into his mind.

The survivors of the village sprawled wearily about. Grandfather Nurgle had gorged himself on the putrefying husks of their loved ones, and those who his whim had spared lay in darkness, eyes bleached of tears, faces and bodies wasted with grief. They felt only the faintest, dullest pangs of dread when the beasts rushed from the forest’s edge and fired their homes while they were still inside. A few even remained still, sagging with impossible exhaustion, as the flames lapped over their limbs, incapable of even a token effort to save themselves from its cruel touch. Those that staggered into the night air to be cut down didn’t recognise the warped figure leading the horde as the strange little boy they had once known. Now he bellowed war-chants as he strode at the head of his beast-brothers, clad in shining brass.

When Hans Keffler was one-hundred-and-six he returned to the dead ground where the village had once stood. He was newly returned from his holy quest to the uttermost North, and now marched in the armies of Chaos. His regiment did not camp there long. There were scant pickings to be had in that desolated region now. Yet for a few moments, while his comrades hissed and grunted in sleep, the creature that had once been Hans Keffler stood tall and alone in his war-plate under the jutting boughs of the Drakwald trees, gimlet eyes of livid flame staring through the eye-slit of his hammered bronze face-plate. He studied the burnt scar in the ground where a barn had once stood, and the dry bed of the stream that had once run beneath the eaves, remembering.

A rumble went up from the camp, like the solemn beating of a great, dark heart. With groans and hisses, the Children of Chaos came awake, the yammering chorus of thousands of voices rising towards the stars. With a last, lingering glance, Hans Keffler turned and walked towards the sonorous voices of the drums.


End file.
